Last week, amid international fanfare, one of the prison's most famous former inmates, Herman Wallace, was ordered freed by a federal judge (from another prison) after spending 40 years in solitary confinement at Angola for a crime he almost certainly didn't commit. Three days later, he died of cancer that had gone largely untreated at the prison. "I am free," Wallace said, just before he died, his demise a grim reminder of a life spent mostly alone in a 6' by 9' foot cell inside a facility that was once part of a Deep South plantation.

In August, the prison's iconic warden, Burl Cain, apologized publicly for violating a federal court order in another lawsuit. This one, still pending, was brought by inmates who alleged they'd been kept in confinement in such brutal heat, without cross ventilation, that their constitutional rights were violated. "It's the price offenders pay for their crimes against humanity," said a lawyer representing the prison.

And the month before that, in July, four members of Congress wrote a letter to the Justice Department, asking federal officials to investigate the prison's "egregious and extensive" use of solitary confinement. "We have reason to believe," the Congressmen wrote, "that Louisiana DOC employees have colluded with persons from the Office of the Louisiana Attorney General to fabricate violations of prison rules to unjustifiably punish inmates."

So you can imagine how pleased Cain and company must have been last weekend when The New York Times published a piece about their prison titled "Bible College Helps Some At Louisiana Prison Find Peace." Indeed, you can't pay for the sort of good publicity the newspaper just gave to those beleaguered prison officials, especially on the eve of jury selection in the trial of inmate Barry Edge, the last of the so-called "Angola 5" to be prosecuted for the death of a corrections officer during a botched 1999 escape.

Here's an illustrative passage from the Times:

But Burl Cain, the warden since 1995, says the impact has gone well beyond spreading religion among the inmates. He calls the Bible college central to the transformation of Angola from one of the most fearsome prisons in the country to one of the more mellow, at least for those deemed to be cooperative. Watching men quietly saunter from open dormitories to church, many with Bible in hand and dressed in T-shirts of their choice, it can hardly seem like a maximum-security facility, although multiple daily lineups for inmate counts are a reminder.

The Times piece suggested that life at the prison is much safer these days for both inmates and guards because of this new-found religious activity and because "court supervision and a parade of reforming wardens improved staff training and introduced vocational and G.E.D. programs." While reporting on those inmates who aren't necessarily involved in the prison's missionary work, reporter Eric Eckholm offered this:

But life is much harder for some inmates than others. Some 1,600 live in more traditional cell blocks because they are considered dangerous, are being punished or need protection. Some of them are allowed outside, in individual cages, for only an hour a day. Some work in the farms for pennies per hour, guarded by a horse-mounted armed officer.

This is essentially all the Times has to say about those inmates who "are considered dangerous, are being punished or need protection." But of course one could argue that it is those inmates in particular that Times' readers need to know about most because they are the ones whom pious prison officials aren't parading before reporters. And the phrasing itself-- "are being punished or need protection"-- begs the question of how Angola classifies its prisoners, and why, and whether its classifications are reasonable.

For context and a different perspective on what life is really like inside that prison, I showed the Times piece to several people with long experience working with prisoners at Angola. All were critical of the article. And all were dubious of the role of religion as a wholly positive factor at Angola. "I'm not an expert on Christianity," said Ben Cohen (no relation), a lawyer who represents capital defendants and others there. "But the prison is run on fear, not the prospects of redemption. Inmates, guards, even lawyers are afraid of Cain."

I showed the Times piece to Jackie Sumell, a New York filmmaker who has studied the effects of solitary confinement. Sumell has spent time inside the prison, and her criticism of the policies and practices at Angola recently was documented in Herman's House, a film about Wallace that aired on PBS. Sumell is a longtime critic of Cain's, no doubt, and when I asked her for her reaction to the Times' story she offered these allegations, which we were unable to independently verify:

I have been visiting inmates in Angola for 12 years. Warden Cain strategically and effectively disempowers inmates at his facility by making extreme examples out of "the few" as a means to terrify the many who are forced to live inside the walls of Angola. In some examples, men have faced more decades of solitary confinement for not adhering to strict Christian codes and maintaining their political beliefs. It has been my experience working with formerly incarcerated men that many, even after they are released, continue to fear the notoriously retributive wrath of Burl Cain.

I showed the article to Mercedes Montagnes, the deputy director of the Promise of Justice Initiative, which represents the plaintiffs in the "heat" litigation mentioned above. Here is what she had to say about Angola, a perspective similar to allegations she has made in court in the pending lawsuit:

Angola continues to confine men in heat that would be illegal for any of the animals on the farm, provides them with little or negligent medical care, punishes the mentally ill with severe lock-down procedures and uses searches and solitary confinement as punishment, even when they are no longer necessary.

While there is a focus on religion, the prison prevents prison ministers from meeting with inmates' families, supporting pardon or parole applications, or even communicate privately with inmates through letters. While some inmates appear to be able to secure favors through acts of devotion, the system does not foster hope, dignity or justice for the vast majority of men that work the fields, and fill the camps at Angola.

I showed the article to Stephen Bright, a lecturer at Yale Law School who also is president of the Southern Center for Human Rights, a leading civil rights law firm that focuses upon men and women incarcerated in the nation's prisons and jails. Bright is one of the nation's foremost experts on indigent defense and one of the most sober legal analysts I know. His take on religion at Angola:

I visited Angola when I served on the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America's Prisons in 05-06. Warden Cain told us proudly about the Bible College, saying that it was open to Muslims, Jews, Buddhists and other religions. But what was taught in the class we watched was a very strict version of Southern Baptist Christianity. We also visited a number of Christian churches on the prison grounds and the prison's radio station, which was all gospel all the time...

Education and practice of one's religion can be very important in prisons, particularly one like Angola where many prisoners will never be released. But there is an important difference between providing classes and religious indoctrination. One way an inmate gains some privileges at Angola is by graduating from the college, becoming an "assistant minister," and preaching Christianity to other inmates.

Louisiana has an obligation to provide educational programs other than the Bible College donated by a Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Inmates have many religions besides Christianity - and their beliefs should be respected and accommodated. And obviously, there are many other educational programs that could be provided.

It is simply not accurate to attribute the drop in violence at Angola to the Bible College and Warden Cain.The violence at Angola was under control by the time that Cain was made warden.

And then I showed the Times piece to James Ridgeway, the veteran investigative journalist with a long history of reporting on prisons. His response:

Everyone from the evangelical press to Oprah to Charlie Rose to the New York Times have pitched in to portray Burl Cain as the nation's leading prison reformer. He is without question a genius PR man. But if you don't believe in his version of a Christian God or your views of what Christianity amounts to, are different from those of the warden, you don't qualify for "redemption." You are pointed down to Hell, not up to Heaven. Even the Angola prisoner who tried to start a yoga class ran up against a wall.

Ridgeway, who is the director and editor of the well-respected prison watchdog site Solitary Watch, surely must have felt a sense of deja vu when he read Eckholm's piece. Let me take you back now nearly four years, to January 2010, to the lede of a Ridgeway piece titled "The Mark of Cain":

The Associated Press today put out a laudatory piece on Warden Burl Cain's program of Christian education at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. The article, which was picked up by the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and dozens of other publications, is sure to advance Cain's reputation as a great prison reformer.

The AP piece depicts Angola as a onetime den of violence and despair that has been transformed by Cain into a safe and orderly community where "everyone has a job" and where "students crowd into classrooms to study toward a college degree." The prison's bloody past, Cain tells the AP, was "all because of a lack of hope"--a situation the warden has treated with the dual remedy of education and redemption, in part through a degree program in Christian Ministry.

There's another side to this story, of course, and it's a whole lot grimmer than the AP piece would suggest. More than 90 percent of the 5,200 men Angola will die there, thanks to the states harsh sentencing policies. Much of the work on the 18,000-acre former slave plantation consists of backbreaking labor in the cotton, corn, and soybean fields, presided over by armed guards on horseback.

Some inmates do not work at all because they are kept in isolation in their cells, in the prison's notorious Camp J disciplinary unit or in long-term solitary confinement. (Among Angola's most widely known prisoners are former Black Panthers Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox, members of the Angola 3, who have been in solitary for more than 37 years.)

An inmate's fate at Angola depends upon how he measures up to the warden's standards, which are rooted firmly in his personal religious dogma. Cain believes that there is only one path toward rehabilitation, and it runs through Christian redemption. (According to Herman Wallace, Cain has at least once offered to release him from solitary if he renounced his political beliefs and accepted Jesus Christ as his savior.)

Sound familiar? There is more. One year later, writing for Mother Jones, Ridgeway again reported on the pervasive role of religion at Angola in a piece titled "God's Own Warden." This lengthy piece, in particular, is essential in offering a dissenting view of life inside that prison. It also undermines one of the central premises of the Times' piece. As Ridgeway wrote:

In fact, there is considerable evidence that the turnaround at Angola began two decades before Cain became warden, in the 1970s, when a prisoner lawsuit forced the facility into federal oversight and a series of reforms began. According to Burk Foster, a professor of criminal justice at Saginaw Valley State University in Michigan and the leading historian of Angola, by the mid-1980s Angola was already the most secure prison in the South. Prison violence is down dramatically across the country; the prison murder rate has fallen more than 90 percent (PDF) nationwide in the last three decades.

I get the lure of a "Bibles-working-in-prison" story, especially when the prison is one of the most brutal in the nation. But a piece that centers around the claim that Angola is one of "the more mellow" prisons in America is regrettable, especially at a time when prison officials there are besieged by claims alleging precisely the opposite.

On Wednesday, as if to prove the point, investigators working for the Center for Constitutional Rights and the International Federation for Human Rights released a report concluding that "conditions on death row" at Angola "can constitute torture" and violate international law and constitutional norms. As for Cain, he gets the last word. Cain did not specifically deny the particular allegations made above. Instead, he offered this defense:

I believe that the mission of modern corrections is to protect the public by correcting deviant behavior through moral rehabilitation. I have faith in people and moral people are not criminals. If we want prison systems that accept a 50% recidivism rate then we have business as usual and change is not in order. Angola is a safe prison, we have a staff of professional correctional employees (60% of whom are female), and manage over 6300 adult male inmates of which 0ver 95% won't ever be released.

It's safe for anyone to walk anywhere within the 18,000 acre prison without cat calls or disrespect. We tour over 2,000 people each month, from 12 years old and up, without incident as part of our public service of education and crime deterrence. We are visited by criminal justice professionals from around the world and many states are copying our programs and events to experience the type of reduction in inmate on inmate violence that Angola has accomplished over the last 18 years.

If this is bad, then we should go back as we were. Personally, I do not attend church except occasionally at the prison. I am proud that the Louisiana State Penitentiary is recognized and accredited by the American Correctional Association as being a great model facility whose operational policies and procedures exemplify what is best in achieving less recidivism and less victimization.

I applaud the Louisiana Department of Corrections for having established itself as the most progressive prison system in the United States. It is disheartening that a few who resist change and want business as usual would attack our progress. I am proud that our staff and inmates will continue to plow new ruts for others who want to venture in the direction of positive change for all people affected by violence.

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Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

And if thy brother, a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from thee. And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty: thou shalt furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and out of thy floor, and out of thy winepress: of that wherewith the LORD thy God hath blessed thee thou shalt give unto him. And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee: therefore I command thee this thing today.

— Deuteronomy 15: 12–15

Besides the crime which consists in violating the law, and varying from the right rule of reason, whereby a man so far becomes degenerate, and declares himself to quit the principles of human nature, and to be a noxious creature, there is commonly injury done to some person or other, and some other man receives damage by his transgression: in which case he who hath received any damage, has, besides the right of punishment common to him with other men, a particular right to seek reparation.

Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Most of the big names in futurism are men. What does that mean for the direction we’re all headed?

In the future, everyone’s going to have a robot assistant. That’s the story, at least. And as part of that long-running narrative, Facebook just launched its virtual assistant. They’re calling it Moneypenny—the secretary from the James Bond Films. Which means the symbol of our march forward, once again, ends up being a nod back. In this case, Moneypenny is a send-up to an age when Bond’s womanizing was a symbol of manliness and many women were, no matter what they wanted to be doing, secretaries.

Why can’t people imagine a future without falling into the sexist past? Why does the road ahead keep leading us back to a place that looks like the Tomorrowland of the 1950s? Well, when it comes to Moneypenny, here’s a relevant datapoint: More than two thirds of Facebook employees are men. That’s a ratio reflected among another key group: futurists.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.